California Law Was A Better Anti-Spam Law

Monday, November 03, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: anti-spam laws, anti-spam legislation, email marketing

In the aftermath of federal anti-spam legislation, California's law becomes largely irrelevant. But on technical terms, it was a far more effective law for stopping spam than the current federal law. Why? Because it was an opt-in law, not an opt-out law.

Let me explain: The current federal law allows spammers to keep on spamming you until you opt out of the list. There's no requirement that you opt in at all. Given that every individual, business and organization in the country has the right to spam you under federal law, this adds up to tens of thousands of sources who can legitimately email you even though you never asked to be emailed. You would have to say "no thanks" to each one.

An opt-in law like California's, however, had a much tighter standard: recipients must opt-in to receiving email or, at least, have a relationship with the organization sending them the email.

This is a much higher standard. In fact, it's the permission marketing standard, which requires that marketers only email people with their permission.

In the minds of most people, when they say they don't want to be spammed, what they mean is that they want organizations to adopt permission email marketing standards. But what got from Washington was quite different: they got a law that allows any organization to keep spamming them until they say, "Stop!"

This is hardly a permission marketing stance, but the federal law was passed precisely because the California opt-in law scared the DMA and other marketing special interest groups so much that they lobbied for the passage of the easier, opt-out law.

By passing the opt-out law, legislators in Washington were able to claim that they were doing something to fight spam while, in fact, accomplishing practically nothing at all. The lawmakers are happy, the DMA is happy, and spammers are especially happy, for now they can email people under the protection of U.S. federal law.

The only people getting the shaft with this deal are, of course, all the Internet users who demanded real action on the issue in the first place.